Hans Bellmer, History, and Psychoanalysis

Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety. Sue Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. xx + 310. 126 illustrations. $39.95.

Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer. Therese Lichtenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 254. 82 illustrations. $45.00.

Mutated, sometimes mutilated, dolls define the German-born artist Hans Bellmer's (1902-75) place within twentieth-century art. He began to construct his first doll in Berlin in 1933. Strongly suggestive of an adolescent girl in shape and size, it consisted of an unusually flexible wood and metal structure covered with papier-mâché and plaster. A second doll followed two years later, with various body parts and appendages made from glue and tissue paper pivoting around a central ball joint. In staging these dolls as models for a large number of photographs, Bellmer created one of the most interesting and controversial bodies of work associated with surrealism. He documented the stages of construction of the first doll, ranging from the quasi-scientific arrangement of its individual body parts to the near-complete assembly of a body with face and hair lying on a bed. He experimented more with the second, more flexible doll, whose upper body and face are frequently replaced by a second set of legs. We encounter it in dramatically lit interiors or outdoors in the forest with suggestive props such as a hoop or a carpet beater. The photographs of the second doll are often hand-colored with garish aniline dyes.

Sue Taylor and Therese Lichtenstein's recent books on Bellmer are not the first critical accounts of his doll photographs, which have played a prominent role in recent art historical scholarship on surrealist art, most notably in that of Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster. ¹ Neither are these books the first to look beyond the relatively brief doll period to survey Bellmer's life and complete oeuvre, the subject of a thorough 1986 monograph by Peter Webb. ² Yet Taylor and Lichtenstein are the first to combine these two objectives as they each weave a remarkably consistent thesis across different periods of Bellmer's visual production and writings. Both authors turn to psychoanalytic concepts as a theoretical basis, but their conclusions could not be more different.

Lichtenstein's book, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, explores the intersection of psychoanalysis and history. On the one hand, the author identifies as the artist's the emotional needs and sexual desires registered in Bellmer's doll photographs as well as in his contemporary and later drawings. Yet in her view, these needs and desires run parallel to, are constructed by, or subvert, those played out in the cultural, social, and political spheres of Germany during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. She warns early on in the book that she makes "no claims for a linear causality between Bellmer's work, his life, and the larger public sphere." "Instead," she writes, "my focus is on the indeterminate space in which personal and psychosexual elements connect with public, cultural ones. My aim is not to discover or even look for an 'origin' for Bellmer's work but to investigate the complex context in which it 'lived'" (17).

Central to her argument is the "anagram" and Bellmer's interest in the contemporary neurologist Paul Schilder, who developed a theory of the expression of emotions through body language. The doll's body and its changing physical appearances (documented in the photographs) function like anagrams in that they are symptomatic of unconscious psychosexual and emotional states at work in both the artist and the surrounding culture at large. Various psychoanalytic concepts lead Lichtenstein to specify these states and elaborate on their multiple meanings. To begin with, there is Bellmer's fascination with doubles (the multiplying of limbs or the use of mirrors, for example) and with sadomasochistic power relations (the doll as a martyr or seductress). These present a response to an early childhood experience of loss and abandonment...